Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday July 01, 2004 @08:25PM
from the thought-of-that-before dept.

I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."

XP's release date has nothing to do with it. You need to find a system than had it in use no later than April 1999, one year before the filing date, to be sure of prior art.

The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102 [cornell.edu].) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.

I guess I'm going to GNU/Hell, but I like taskbar grouping. It's sort of like MDI for the taskbar. That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries among the work-related browsing, all without the tell-tale "auto-hide."

You should try a spin on OS X 10.3. The dock counters your second problem -- blinking alerts -- by bouncing transparent alert messages just into your view. It counters your third problem with its Option-TAB switching...shows a transparency with BIG ICONS in the middle of the screen everything currently open, which you can TAB until you find the one you want OR you can click on it.

It's a pretty clean desktop. I wish I could dump my crotechety old win2k box at work!

"Secondly, who wants to go challenge such a useless patent in court? I mean, principles aside, if someone did, we would be able..."

The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent", while the courts take the attitude, "It's patented, therefore they must have a valid claim on it", so it's a catch 22 for anyone who has to challenge it. This means that it needs to be challenged now, while it's a new, fresh patent, and while the collective "we" can come up with examples of prior art that are confirmable before the application was placed. If we don't do this, in a few years once history has been somehwat obfuscated over time it'll be harder and harder to challenge, and the patent holder might actually win if the people against the patent don't have what they need to challenge it properly.

Until we change either 1) the patent office or 2) the courts, we'll continue to have to fight this. I'm personally in favor of changing the patent office, requiring a given posting on "to be approved" patents giving a timeframe like six months for the pending patent to be challenged. This would keep the USPTO from being overworked by actively having to research themselves, yet would give the community a way to fight against stupid and overly constraining patents, or to help prevent patents on "well, duh!" types of things.

Of course, we really just need to abolish software patents altogether, but that's another argument.

You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.

1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)

2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.

E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.

E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.

E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.

Etc.

To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.

In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.

Now I do understand that it's fashionable on/. to bitch and moan about how you should be allowed to steal everyone's work. Whether it's copy-and-pasting someone's algorithm, or downloading every new movie on P2P, or whatever, the ISO-standard/. freeloader should never have to pay for anything.

However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.

I don't wish to seem petty, but the examples you give are NOT software. They're mathematical algorithms which could be implemented in software if you wanted. Or you could build dedicated hardware to do it, or you could work it all out by hand, (in theory), or anything else you fancy.

I've never heard this argument that crypto patents (et al) are trivial. The argument I have heard is that this is the implementation of a mathematical method.

Now, a lot of folk think that maths is about discovery of relationships that are consistent with the current mathematical/logical framework (like pure science). Further, that this isn't _invention_ (though it is very worthwhile and highly skilled work that I greatly admire). [You appear to think that maths is discovery and invention?]

So, the only bit left to be an invention then is the programming an algorithm into a computer, given the algorithm. This can be simple - technical but not inventive, the sort of thing programmers commonly do.

Often, it will be hard because of the optimisations required. So, claim the optimisations in a patent, but the mere implementation of the algorithm isn't inventive IMO. Basically, I don't think that mathematics is (nor should be) patentable. This way anyone can use the basic mathematics and produce their own optimisations.

PS: I don't think the optimisations should be patentable either (different argument). But I do feel that there is a strong argument that if anything else is patentable that such optimisations (that make inventive use of the platform) should be considered to have an inventive technical effect and so be patentable.

Just because somebody invented something, does not mean that he has supreme right over that thing. Do you think humanity will be where it is now with software patents ?

I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?

Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.

You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.

Well, see, same thing with software. Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)

Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result. The problem comes when you consider the scope of the patent.

Does the patent cover the same process with, say, one step added? Well, it has to, otherwise people could get around it easily. Similarly it has to cover the same process with maybe one or two steps removed, or swapped around. So what you get is a patent which is too broad, preventing people from addressing the same problem in even remotely the same way.

Let's say people had started patenting algorithms since the 1950s. It's almost too horrible to think of. Let's see, what would have made a good patent... binary trees, linked lists, B-trees, heaps, hash tables... oops, all your memory storage possibilities have gone. Better wait 20 years if you want to use a sensible data structure without paying royalties.

Line drawing algorithms -- those weren't trivial to develop, either. So now you can't actually draw straight lines efficiently without paying royalties.

I know, how about compiler compilers, LR parsers, and so forth? Then nobody can actually program at all. I suppose that would solve the problem completely.

Codec and encryption patents are only sensible because a) you have to use exactly the same codec or encryption as the other person, so the scope of the patent can be narrow b) it's a really bad idea to be too restrictive about use of your wonderful new codec or ecryption scheme.

Software patents in general are a real menace, and I doubt you'll convince many programmers otherwise...

The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent"

Also, on a more general note -- the more patent activity this year (the more "problems" that need solving), the more revenue the patent office will "need" next year. When you're the head of a bureaucracy funded through force, your "success" is measured not by the usefulness of your service (the approval of your clients), but rather by the level of authority and funding you are granted by the higher-ups (the feds).

In other words, it's not in the patent office's best interest to operate fairly and efficiently, just as it's not in government's best interest to limit it's powers over the people. Sure, government could have followed the plan set forth by the founders (strictly limited government), but then, what's in it for them?

Well, M$ recieved a patent for double-clicking, as was discussed in a previous./ article [slashdot.org]. The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them. If you want to learn more, read _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy. It's an excellent book (I just finished reading it today), and very educational.

They didn't patent double clicking. Go read the patent.... they patented application buttons on PDA's (and similar devices) that performs different functions depending on how long the buttons are pressed, and how many times it's clicked within a specific amount of time. Whether or not they should've been granted that patent debatable, but simply saying that they've been granted a patent on double clicking is just wrong, and just plain silly.

Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.

Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.

Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.

Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.

Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").

The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).

Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?

The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them.

The mouse was developed by Doug Englebart [ibiblio.org] at Stanford Research Institute more than a decade before PARC came into existence.

Apple paid a lot of money to license PARC's technologies. Apple also hired several ex-PARC employees. Apple also heavily improved on PARC's ideas; it certainly wasn't the case that Apple simply "stole" the Star. And it certainly was NOT the case

bah, they can have the power button patent. I would just like to see who ever patented the reset button for laptop lax the fees a bit, its been years since I had a laptop with a reset button. And holding the power button while I conplate the meaning of life sucks.

Microsoft (as well as any other corp out there) patents everything they can. The real headline should be "USPO grants Patent to MS for $DUH_GUIFEATURE". That's who your pitchforks should be pointed at unless you'd like to point them at IBM, Apple, Palm, Sun....

It seems like the "new" twist in WinXP is that the grouping happens only when there is no more room left in the taskbar, and when there's room again it ungroups.

Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying, because you have to switch your mind-gears between "searching among open windows for the useful window" and "search for the app icon and then navigate to the useful window". I'd rather have "grouping always" or "grouping never", the latter being what you get when you disable the grouping 'feature'.

Install the Tweak UI Powertoy. You get a "Group when N or more windows" option. Setting it to 2 gives you always. As you mention, the option to disable it entirely is in the standard taskbar preferences dialog.

My bed room,Every since I was a young child (25 odd years ago), i've been scattering things on the floor, and then when there's too many things I tity them up into groups, only to be scattered again when I have more space, ore some of them have been put away properly.

When I worked in a resturant we used to group meal tickets when there wasn't enough space on the 'task bar'

Imagemaster (not an OS, but a program) for the Amiga had toolbars for processsing images. The toolbars had pop-up lists of windows containing images. These pop up (some of them "popped sideways", in fact) lists were dynamically generated, dynamically grouped, and dynamically positioned with the other tools. Images (we just called them "buffers") could be items without an assigned role, paintbrushes, composing sources, composing targets, filter sources, etc. And there could be any number of buffers loaded. So grouping by assigned role was a big issue.

The entire toolbar was dynamically generated, and could contain various assortments of tools, images, palettes and so forth - and there were a number of other dynamically instantiated things there too, such as proportional controls, buttons, text entry widgets and so forth. Various classes of things always grouped together. The toolbar itself could auto-hide and pop up when you moused down to it, or it could pop in and out based upon a right-click. And in fact, we had implemented both auto-hide of the toolbar, and auto-hide of contextually inapropriate and not recently used tools in May of 1990, in an earlier product called "reg-paint", now that I think about it.

The fact that the toolbars in Imagemaster were totally dynamic and context-sensitive with the specific aim of being reductionist was actually a selling point for the program, well beyond the convenience of having the UI configure itself for what you were doing at the moment. This was because the Amiga had a limited amount of what was called "chip" memory (1 or 2 mb), which was basically the only memory that could contain drawable graphics, playable sounds, and some other system stuff. So the fact that the program's huge number of controls, windows and so on were dynamically generated and accessed by a panel that only contained what you needed, as you needed it, was a pretty big deal. That made the panel itself a very stingy consumer of chip memory, and that was the primary inspiration for a lot of what it did.

Imagemaster was shipping in February of 1991. Tons of supporting documentation, magazine articles, manuals, users, you name it. Way too much to get lost in the sands of time. Very popular application, too. Imagemaster brought out the very first implementation of morphing on a desktop PC. Imagemaster shipped until Commodore's demise and for a little while thereafter, and that toolbar existed in every version.

So Billy can bite me. Either Pete Patterson and myself came up with the idea first, or someone before us did (which would be fine, I could care less), but it sure as heck wasn't Microsoft. Or Be.:)

Sideways remark: We used to say that if Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they'd market it as "lukewarm, dead bird." The Amiga was amazing for its time. I still miss the machine at times. But I sure don't miss Commodore.

"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."

GNOME did this before Microsoft did I seem to recall. The date of the Patent Application is 2001 - I do not know if GNOME did this then. I am surprised if the concept was not published prior to Microsoft's application though.

You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?

What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.

The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.

I don't remember exactly but a while earlier there was a patent described on slashdot which was simply a mix of a couple basic techniques. My analogy (although incorrect and over-simplifed) was the notion of patenting the mix of peanut butter, jelly, and bread, even if you have no obvious ownership over the rest.

Actually I am remembering now. It was the concept of having a window fade when not in use, and fade more as it is not being used, patented by Apple. This combines time and variable transparenc

While there is probably prior art for this, you have to realize that the issue date in not what determines if the prior art is relevant. It is the invention date or original filing date, which in this case was back in April 2000.

Of course, this is just more verification that Microsoft's never actually invented anything. Just taken ideas from other companies and then crushed them to try and make the world forget who really innovates.

So if they're going to patent this crap, why don't they do something truly novel and innovative and let me rearrange the processes on my taskbar so that they're not arranged in a completely useless order (ie the order in which I opened them, earliest to latest). And maybe let me arbitrarily reduce some processes to systray icons instead of huge frickin rectangles.

I just know someone's going to tell me you can do it in Window Manager XYZ, and if I'd just googled it, I'd know that. But if not, then I could actually celebrate that I had an original idea for once and go eat a steak dinner. Or maybe I should just go eat steak anyways.

When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.

Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.

The is the FIRST feature I turn off on any XP computer I encounter. I cannot think of a single more annoying feature than hiding all of the windows I really have under one thing, where I have to spend an inordinate amount of time reaching the icon, waiting for the list to appear, then hunting through the list.

This is not obvious stuff. If there is prior art, then there is reason to bitch. I haven't seen proof of such, and I don't think everyone should be jumping on the "I hate Microsoft" bandwagon until they see prior art.

Sure it may seem obvious now...but the first time you saw it, you probably said "oh, that's weird". Even if you had thought of it years before, not everyone did. And they still had a right to patent it since you didn't, and you didn't implement it.

>> Until I see prior art, yes, I believe this idea is both novel and non-obvious.

Seeing prior art has nothing to do with the non-obvious part.

>> If I was designing something like this I wouldn't even have considered it. That makes it non-obvious. Whether or not it is novel depends on whether or not someone else did it first. I have seen no such thing.

Just because you think it's non-obvious doesn't make it so. I find it very obvious, and think I would have done the same. I think a lot of pe

Why isn't it obvious? One of the flaws with a taskbar is that if you have too many applications running your taskbar becomes nothing more than a non-descript button bar. There's only so many ways you can resolve this problem. Tooltips, autosizing the taskbar so the buttons are descriptive again and *gasp* grouping the buttons to free up real estate.

I haven't seen a grouping yet that was particuliarly innovative. How about grouping by interrealtion? I group an Excel spreasheet together a Word document beca

Not obvious? You cannot be serious; not only is it obvious but I've seen it at least once before (KDE???). Yet the worst thing about it is not it's obviousness or whether there's any prior art but that it's the kind of thing I can imagine a highly configurable desktop or window manager might allow a user to figure out how to do by him/herself.

It's the kind of thing that I can imagine the developers of said configurable desktop might not actually have explicitly programmed into it in the first place. I can

The problem everyone is hav ing here is that "obvious" doesn't mean "obivous". Sure, maybe it seems obvious to a user, but obvious in the context of patentability has a very specific definition:

From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):

"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."

The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.

It always helps to actually read the claims:Claim 1 simply says that if for example you have a button for a word file x.doc (handled by winword.exe) and the system receives a request to create a button for y.doc it will figure out that x.doc and y.doc are both handled by winword.exe and place the button for y.doc adjacent to the x.doc button. That's all there is to it!

Couple corrections to other postings- you do not claim prior art (it's not yours, is it) you disclose your knolwedge of prior art; that helps the examiner figure out the diffs- the mentioned threshold talks about available space; not how much time has passed

Lastly, the innovation seems to be in the method for deciding how to arrange the buttons (claim 1)all other claims are based on that method. Claims 2 & 3 (grouping) are novel when implemented using the method of claim 1.

By definition if the patent has been granted, than there is no prior art that is the same as the invention. To the extent that another system achieves a similar objective, it must be using a diffenrent method.

Think about it, if they keep patenting little stupid things like this as an attempt to cripple and slow down alternate desktops such as X from advancing in the market place then this in the long run is probably a bad move,

As it's already been proved many times that if you make something not possible for someone they will work out a compromise and at least 70% of the time come up with something better and more efficient.

Obviously the desktop war is far from over but the industry needs innovation (Even if it has to be forced into it)

Is there a way to take preemptive action against patents for which prior art exits [slashdot.org]?
Or do we have to wait for one of these seemingly foolish patents to go to court someday?

If it hasn't been done already, somebody in the OSS community (Red Hat?, IBM?) should set up a fund that is devoted to obtaining patents and putting them under a free license or something. Maybe sales of a popular software product (or portion of sales of services from OSS software) could be funnelled into the fund.

You have to wonder exactly what Microsoft's IP department was thinking when they decided to file this patent. Are they really going to go after open source projects with "taskbar grouping?" The negative PR cost alone would seriously outweigh any damages they'd get, not to mention the absurdity of trying to sue an OSS project.
More likely, they're filing it so that no one else can file it and then sue Microsoft (e.g. Sun). Which is why patent laws should be changed to allow anything patentable to be "officially" placed in the public domain.

PJ (from Groklaw) is right in predicting that Microsoft is gathering ammunition (re patents) to take on the Linux distributions. At the moment it seems to be the only manner in which they will be able to hold onto the desktop market in the long term.

OpenLook did this with one of the default installed window managers on Sun 386i installs. That's in the 1980s. That does not eliminate the novel and non-obvious actions based on timings. Many patents are aggregations of non-patentable concepts or separately patented items. Look at any patent for some automotive device and you'll see lots of follow-on patents. It not like the basic idea of an automatic transmission would be granted a new patent (well maybe given the current USPTO:) but certainly one could use a novel fliud and valving setup (say an automatic transmission for extreme environments that uses molten tin for a combination lubricant and working fluid) and that would be patentable. In fact the above probably was patentable by anyone before just now, and I have a year to file in the US for it... Although from what I hear a combination of the BeOS tracker and tweak UI could achieve the results in 1999 prior to the MS filing date. So maybe there is a case if one were to care enough to wage the battle. Personally I like the Mac OS X dock behavior of listing the windows in a pop-up along with some common functions. It keeps me from bouncing around the display so much once you get ysed to it.

Emacs has exactly this sort of feature in its buffer selection menu. If you have a large number of buffers open, it will group them by mode in a menu for buffer selection (so for example, all c-code buffers are grouped for one submenu, all text buffers in a separate submenu, all python buffers, all TeX buffers etc)

On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.

You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.

It is? Funny, I've found it quite useful when having tons of windows open.

Well, it annoys me to no end. But that's just me. I hate UI inconsistency. You have found it useful when you have "tons of windows open". How useful is when it _just starts_ grouping? Say it has one or two groups of two windows? Not much, I'd say. Anyway, since mozilla got tabbed browsing I rarely have half a ton of windows open. Just a couple of mozillas with a quarter ton tabs each;)

I've seen it in Win98SE and W2K, in both cases with Symantec Enterprise (for grouping various Norton utilities, like AV, Ghost, etc.). First I saw it was last fall, however.

I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.

Could the macintosh dock's function be considered grouped taskbar buttons? Multiple windows of a single application are all associated with a single button... It's not the same, but depending upon the wording, it might fit. I'm not saying it's prior art by any means, but it could pose a problem to mac users.

It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.

Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.

Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.

Speaking of KDE, did anyone notice that a KDE mailing list thread from 1999 was referenced in the application? Having followed those lists during that time, I know that a lot of similar ideas were batting around the lists before this patent application was placed. In fact, KDE (3.0, I believe, or maybe even the 2.x series) came out with the taskbar grouping feature prior to the release of XP.

Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.

If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.

Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!

Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.

One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if

- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.

It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.

Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places:-)So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers;-)